Sarah Dillingham, who has two decades of experience running enterprise information projects in the City and for central government, has now established tech start-up company CaseStudyNinja.com in Beckenham, South London. She attended the London GEO Meet a Mentor event in October 2015 on the lookout for a mentor, with a view to gaining some guidance in attracting funding. We caught up with Sarah to find out what she took from the event.

CaseStudyNinja.com is an innovative piece of online software that allows people to create, manage and share case studies about their enterprises. Its objective is to help businesses win new work and reach fresh audiences with their products and services, as Sarah explains:

“At the moment we’re running a pilot with consultancy firms and tech firms. Our primary market is professional services, technology and engineering. In those areas, being able to provide case studies of effective work you’ve completed is absolutely critical to winning bids.

“If a business has done a great piece of work and they want to write it up as a success story, we’ve made it easy for them to do that. The case studies go into an online database and people can decide whether to keep it private within their teams or share it out with the world. There are lots of ways they can choose to use the finished case studies.”

Although Sarah gained senior level professional experience over a twenty-year career, she wasn’t accustomed to operating within or leading a start-up business. A friend thought it would be useful for her to seek contacts in the start-up world and suggested that she should go along to Meet a Mentor. For Sarah, enterprise mentoring was a familiar idea and she signed up right away:

“I’d had mentors in my old world and had been mentored, but it was never done formally. It was something that always arose fairly organically. For example, I’d meet someone junior in the business who I thought was talented and, perhaps over coffee, they’d ask some questions. We’d discuss what they hoped to get out of it but in quite a natural, informal way. However, finding a mentor in the start-up world can be quite challenging and I’m still not quite there! I did meet some great people at Meet a Mentor though, and there are some I have stayed in touch with on a peer level, to meet for a coffee and share a few ideas.”

Sarah plans to attend a second GEO Meet a Mentor event, she was so impressed with the quality of her first:

“I met some great people, despite not yet finding an established mentor and I’ll happily go back again for more networking. One of the good things that came out of Meet a Mentor for me was that someone introduced me to a great female tech community called Ada’s List. It was a very worthwhile afternoon for me and for CaseStudyNinja.com.”